Buy supplies?

@spunkus-skunkus Sounds like those legends need something to sink their money into.

My friends and I spend the beginning of every session:

• Scouring the island for barrels, and dragging supplies on the boat five bananas at a time.
• Going to the nearest skeleton fort, and dragging supplies on the boat 10 cannon balls at a time.

And that's a good 30-45 minutes spent, not playing the game, but preparing to play the game. And then being gun-shy about participating in anything dangerous because we don't want to lose our supplies. Not loot, just supplies.

I mean, sure, we loaded up for bear for a mission, but we laser-focus on that mission even if other cool stuff shows up, simply out of fear of losing our supplies. We've run from other ships, not because we had something they'd want to steal, but because we'd just gotten supplies and didn't want to lose them to sinking.

Because it's not the supplies we don't want to lose; it's the time we spent to fill them, and the time we will have to spend to replace them.

Even if you couldn't just drop coin to fill your boat, being able to buy a 50-box of stuff would be amazing. Heck, make it a quest. We spend money to get a map that will lead us to buried supplies; a box of bananas, cannonballs, and planks. Still have to go out and get the supplies, but at least it's faster than hoofing around 2-3 islands.

And if you want a real good way to redistribute the wealth from the 1% to us shlubs in the lower class who have to pick supplies out of the dirt...

...make an online market. Users can sell boxes of supplies on the market, and other users can buy them. The price would be set by the market. Lower class people like me could collect up boxes of supplies and put them on this market for the price we think they're worth; the rich ships could buy our supplies for inflated prices to avoid doing it themselves. Lower classers like me could even pull stuff off the market when WE need them... or even use the money we earned on the market to buy somebody else's boxes later.

It would make scouring for resources a fun way to actually make some serious money, whilst also giving a bit more flexibility to more affluent crews to speed up their game sessions (or even give us shlubs the opportunity to speed up a game night on occasion).

If they ever add a reputation system, where you could flag crews as troll pirates who don't cooperate, you could even let the people selling on the market add flags; only people with Pirate Reputation higher than X can buy my supply boxes. This would give a market based incentive to keep your score above "troll". I mean, trolls won't care anyway, but at least you could take away the convenience for griefers.

@gamium
"And that's a good 30-45 minutes spent, not playing the game, but preparing to play the game."
You're doing it wrong. Just collect a few supplies at the outpost you spawn, then embark on whatever voyage you want. Everytime you pass an island, have 1 - 2 guys cannon themselves over there and mermaid back with a few additional supplies. You'll have your ship stocked in no time all without wasting a single second.

@freemantle I agree! Like- really? 10 cannon balls but only 5 of bananas and planks?

@ch3f3nzo Maybe my crew has a unique experience, but only once did we actually run up against "running out of supplies" as the reason we were on the ropes. Like I said, we spend time stocking up, and like @Nebenkuh suggested, we've started abusing mermaid mechanics to pad out our inventory.

Having supplies to do the thing we plan on doing, or protecting ourselves whilst doing it, has never been our problem. The time taken to do it, and the risk involved in failing and losing all our stuff is.

Last night we had a bracing chase with an obsessed Galleon chasing us across half the map. Two of our crew planting sea mines and abusing mermaid mechanics to sell off our good stuff as I sailed at warp speed past outposts, losing our bearings and flying out into the edge of the map. We were at the mercy of the winds trying to outmaneuver them, and had to use multiple islands and rocks to gain maneuvering room. It was exciting. And that wasn't something that supplies would have mattered with.

Legendary pirates already have tons of advantages. They've got experience, they've got well oiled drills for their crew. And they're already using existing mechanics to the maximum for their ships. Prying a few doubloons from their claws to save them a little effort stocking up their supplies won't change the power dynamics of the game at all. What it WOULD do is redistribute some of their wealth into the pockets of smaller ships collecting their supplies. Heck, the cannonballs you sell might end up getting shot at you! But you got paid, and probably paid enough to balance the cost of sinking.

yeah it's a no brainer. The merchant should offer to fully stock your ship for a price.

Ive been in several servers recently where we have had to island hop consantly for supplies....and most islands are already stripped of them....

It really sucks. Especially when you need a bunch of supplies to complete certain events!!

@personalc0ffee Resource MANAGEMENT can be fun, like poetry or a game of spades. Constrained rules can lead to interesting discoveries.

Starting each and every session, and each and every sinking (intentional, navigational, or combat) with scouring for resources is not, frankly.

I mean, if you find it fun, there's something out there for everyone, that's for sure. Nobody's making you buy crates of ammo or bananas.

Hell, just having persistence of inventory of some sort would be nice. I don't know how many game sessions have ended short not because we were done, but because we didn't have the time to both gather resources AND do the thing we wanted to do, so we did without. Why log out and lose all that effort?

While I agree that selling your ship on logout to get some money would be nice... how much is a cannonball worth? If it came with the ship, almost nothing. If you found it on the outset island, a few nickels. If you had to run off an island with rampaging skeletons with one in your pocket, quite a lot. Selling inventory on logout just shifts the problem from "I don't have the time to resource collect and it's a waste to log out with extra resources" to "I don't have time to resource collect, and it's not really worth doing some resource collection in the bit of time I have before I log out because the price is too low."

And, again, gold is nice. But if you can't convert cannonballs to gold back to cannonballs, you might as well have had a hold full of chickens, instead.

Almost every other multiplayer shared world game has an economy where gatherers gather and sell, middle classes gather and sell and buy, and upper classes buy. It's a natural system that lets the gatherers hoard value until they can afford to join the middle class, and profligate spenders in the upper class find their good times ending abruptly if they're spendthrift. Oh, you spent 10,000 gold to stock your ship and it sank? Tough beans. Maybe don't fully stock your ship and then be stupid with it.

It would balance out in the end and remove a pain point for players.

@ch3f3nzo That's part of the balancing mechanism that everyone seems to be ignoring, though.

Yes, having a fully paid for and laden ship sink under you WOULD suck. So, you wouldn't load for bear every time you leave port, now would you? People who blow their money on stocks and then sink it away would find themselves rapidly losing way too much money that way. Wars sink a lot of resources, and both sides pay for it over time.

And people who don't want to spend money can happily continue using whichever methods they currently use to load their ships.

Little sloops getting picked on by galleons will be picked on by those galleons, no matter if those galleons got their ammo from a merchant or from scouring islands. Wouldn't it be a trick if the cannonballs that galleon is shooting were gathered by the sloop? Even if the sloop sinks, they probably made more money selling the galleon cannonballs than they lost in the exchange.

This would work best as a market; where people sell their excess for the price they feel is fair, and those with a lack can fill that lack with labor or money... money which goes back to the people who gathered the resources.

I'm not in any way suggesting a "cannonballs from the ether" market, where some fixed price vaporizes gold and creates cannonballs. I'm specifically suggesting a market where players can make money off their efficiency at resource collection. Rich players are already rich because they're already good at the game. Selling them a little efficiency for a little coin isn't going to throw the world into chaos. But it would way increase the quality of life in the game.

@elysianlegion89
Yep, that's how it's done.
I'm solo sailing the galleon most of the time because the rest of the crew will cannon themselves to every island in range to gather supplies.